Plagiarism!

Just before Christmas, at a motorway services WH Smith (bookstore) there was an entire wall gondola width
about 800x 2000cms full of 50SOGs and the myriad copies that have mushroomed.
The top two shelves had soft-porn BDSM titles on it.
A far cry from a few years ago there was just one or possibly top shelf of erotica, much of which was spanking fiction.
If the whole thing comes full circle then LSF publishing and its authors may get rich
Oh I've just seen a pig fly past the window!

Based on the Fifty Shades of Crap phenomenon it appears the worse you write the more chance you have of major success...


For a moment I thought flopsy had got you to plug her Muriel and the Pig ebook...

I believe James was in the publishing industry in some capacity before she got 50 Shades published. Suzanne Collins (Hunger Games) was also an established author and wrote for TV (never understood why her written dialog is so bad with that background) before hitting the big time with Hunger Games. I think some of the parodies of 50 Shades are interesting, especially the Pride and Prejudice mashup: 50 Shades of Mr Darcy.

Minidancer
"Oh dear...am i the only person in the world that actually quite enjoyed reading 50SOG ?"

Minidancer - I read a LOT. What can I say? I found it compulsively readable, but basically a very slightly kinkier Harlequin novel, that's about the wonders of having a gorgeous billionaire fall madly in love with a mousey young girl and be Tamed By True Love, rather than particularly spanko.

By the end of the trilogy he'd basically 'outgrown' his desire to spank/strap/punish her (which isn't really how it works, I don't think) and she still totally hated it. If it were a spanking book, as it were, she'd have grown to enjoy that herself, surely!

Jessica, i totally agree with you. As 'spanking fiction' goes 50SOG is pretty rubbish. But that still didnt stop me enjoying them. I like reading Mills and Boon romances too...and i quite liked the entire Twilight saga! lol. What can i say....maybe my taste in fiction is decidedly 'iffy'! But i was just being honest, thats all.

And then there is, in the US, at least, the case of derivative copyright, of which I hold several.

Minidancer, yeah, I have pretty, shall we say, 'democratic' tastes in reading. Harlequin Presents got me through a good chunk of university; I could read a couple a day on the weekend when really stressed out!

Entitled: 'How Not To Write Spanking Erotica'???

...and Christopher Paolini was remarkably young when he had Eragon published (a 4 part dragons 'n' sorcery trilogy which deteriorated markedly). Whether the fact that his parents owned the publishing house had anything to do with it I couldn't possibly say.